Zone Alarm 4 me?

[jadison]

I currently have a tower case, K6-2 500 based computer running Win98SE, Me and my mom are the only users.

I've heard several posts about how ZoneALarm adds unwanted files to ur hardrive, and these files end up increasing taking up more space on ur HD each time u boot up. I've heard countless other things...Point is, should I download this software??

I have Norton Antivirus and Norton Crashguard running in the system tray so would there be a conflict w/these progs.?

thank you for any input!

-jd-

[RobRich]

Most likely you will never need a firewall for any serious reason, but it does provide an extra layer of security for your system. ZA is an excellent program, and it does NOT collect info about you and you activities. It does create an ecrypted file on your hard drive, but that's for storing information on which programs you want to acces to net, and other various settings and preferences.

For my overall opinion, I will drop a cut and paste from a post I just did at another site concering firewalls and modemo connections:


I'm happily running Conseal PC Firewall and ZoneAlarm at home with just a 56k connect. Conseal filters both my incoming and outgoing traffic, so I know exactly what is going on. Also, it's the commercial version (definitely worth the investment), not the watered down desktop version. Then I use ZA behind it, mainly because I like having the ability to determine exactly what programs can access the net. Also, it provides an extra layer of security, as it catches a few attempts that Conseal misses from time to time.

Yes I'm slightly paranoid, but I want the maximum in security. I want total control over my PC, and that extends to my metworking layer as well. For the rest, if you want to surf blindly and deal with all the useless packets and garbage on you connection go ahead. Most of the unusual port and packet activity on my system are not hacker's try to break by box, but it is just trash (ad servers, system ident., domain searches, etc.) that many popular sites perform these days. With my firewall in place, this trah is filtered, and stopped before it consumes any of my already scarce bandwidth at 56k. If not for security, then run a good firewall just to reach the max potential of your net connection.

http://www.zonelabs.com/beta_download.htm

I'm currently using the new beta with Win98, and haven't seen any problems or negative effects, yet. I appears to be quite stable and works great.

[Smokey]

Yeah, I haven't ran into any "beta" problems yet with it. Seems to work well, and the new logging feature might be interesting too...

[alan]

for the sake of security and peice of mind i use ZA and BlaCkIcE together i have been probed about 15 times since i have started using them and i would'nt go online and use icq without them most of the probes have come via icq but none while icq hasn't been on
dont worry abput a little bit of hd space...
alan

[This message has been edited by alan (edited 03-24-2000).]

[neo_otyugh]

i have been using zonealarm with my dial in and now am using it with a cable modem.
the funny thing is i got a lot more alerts on dial up, i guess my cable service has decent security cause i have yet to be probed...
and zonealarm has had a total of one crash in the past 6 weeks.

[Algee7]

neo_

You got more hits on your dialup because you had been using it longer; that IP is logged at more of the sites that collect info than your new IP.
Have no fear, the longer you're online with the new IP, the more probes you'll be getting http://www.sysopt.com/forum/wink.gif http://www.sysopt.com/forum/smile.gif

[neo_otyugh]

hmmm...i guess i'll see what happens....plus with the dial up i hit a lot of software sites that are not mentioned here...